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Obama and the oil spill (pg. 2)
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by DeleteFromUsers
“We have responded with unprecedented resources, and when you look at what most of the critics say…and you ask them, specifically, what is it that the administration could or should have done differently that would have an impact on whether or not oil was hitting shore, you're met with silence,” Obama said in an interview aired Tuesday on NBC’s “Today Show.”
As per usual, I'm assuming you have no specific solution in mind? |
well for one he can declare a disaster, role out FEMA and start bringing aid to Louisiana, just as Bushs opponents demanded for Katrina (and critisized for the delay of a few days)
He could coordinate government resources with BP for cleanup and army corp of engineers. So far it has been mildly reported that the army corp has been involved very loosely with the operations.
So far all ive seen are some senate hearings with testimony from the rig victims families and photo ops with them. The President himself admitted that they have not even been in contact with BP.
He is supposed to be the leader of the United States, not a follower.
Local and state governments who want to take action due to BPs inaction are actually being order to stand down by the Obama Administration. They say that they should let BP deal with it.
pretty sad.... |
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| Abercrombie |
| INB4KEVINCOSTNER |
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| PivotTechno |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Local and state governments who want to take action due to BPs inaction are actually being order to stand down by the Obama Administration. They say that they should let BP deal with it.
pretty sad.... |
We live in a corporate state, where governments by-and-large follow corporate direction. Obama's hands are most likely completely tied in all this; he's reduced to a concerned face and promisor of massive lawsuits to placate the general public. This whole mess is Klein's disaster capitalism personified and it's really a disgusting thing to bear witness to. But, as long as our energy reliance continues to rest squarely on oil, like this will carry on, unabated. |
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| DeleteFromUsers |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
well for one he can declare a disaster, role out FEMA and start bringing aid to Louisiana, just as Bushs opponents demanded for Katrina (and critisized for the delay of a few days)
He could coordinate government resources with BP for cleanup and army corp of engineers. So far it has been mildly reported that the army corp has been involved very loosely with the operations.
So far all ive seen are some senate hearings with testimony from the rig victims families and photo ops with them. The President himself admitted that they have not even been in contact with BP.
He is supposed to be the leader of the United States, not a follower.
Local and state governments who want to take action due to BPs inaction are actually being order to stand down by the Obama Administration. They say that they should let BP deal with it.
pretty sad.... |
You know that the leak is in 10,000ft of water and an additional 5,000ft of mud, right? That's approx 4,500psi of pressure at the bottom of the Gulf where the leak is. You can't exactly scuba down there and weld the thing shut (indeed, an average human body would have approx 10 million pounds of force acting on them at that depth).
BP was spending approx. $6 million per day at the end of April. That has grown to some $37 million per day now. How many state and local governments have that kind of cash sitting around for a bad day (or 60)?
There are over 2,500 boats working on the cleanup effort. Countless thousands of folks working too.
And those folks aren't sitting at home screaming "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children" from their desk chairs either. They're actually doing something about it.
If you insist on flapping your lips about the issue without fact or insight on a forum devoted to trance music, perhaps you should instead consider putting all that energy into actually DOING SOMETHING. |
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| PivotTechno |
| Too busy clamouring for his right to idle his car for as long as he wants. |
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| malek |
WHat do you want Obama to do anyways?
Tell BP to fix it? That's what they're trying.
Fix it faster? mmm ok. Then what?
Really, BP is doing all it can do, and if any of you guys have a better idea then why don't you step up and tell us your ideas (and so we can laugh a bit).
As if BP hasn't lost half its value on the market ( a tiny 100B$! none the less)
Losing 40k barrels a day, that's another 2.8 million a day lost, on top of all the 1B+ already spent on cleaning efforts.
Managing a disaster is always easier from the comfort of our homes:p |
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| MarkT |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
apparently obama, his government and bp havnt even had dialogue. Hes just letting them do whatever... |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
...
Local and state governments who want to take action due to BPs inaction are actually being order to stand down by the Obama Administration. They say that they should let BP deal with it.
... |
do you realize how ignorant you sound when you make comments like that? do you *really* think the gov't is just "letting them do whatever".
"inaction"? really?
what exactly do you think local gov't can do vs. what BP can do...and what makes you think you know *anything* about what is really involved here?
perhaps you should contact someone in the Obama administration and offer your consulting services. I'm sure no one has the incredible insight you do into this matter.
:rolleyes: |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Local and state governments who want to take action due to BPs inaction are actually being order to stand down by the Obama Administration. They say that they should let BP deal with it.
pretty sad.... |
Its true though. BP is at fault here, and so BP is the only company that has been allowed to do work on shutting down the leak. There are companies and individuals who wanted to step in and try their methods to stop the leak, but unfortunately only the BP has the exclusive access to the site and the methods of dealing with the situation. And they haven't achieved much in terms of stopping the leak. I guess we have to wait until mid-late August for the relief wells to be finished.
| quote: | Originally posted by DeleteFromUsers
You know that the leak is in 10,000ft of water and an additional 5,000ft of mud, right? That's approx 4,500psi of pressure at the bottom of the Gulf where the leak is. You can't exactly scuba down there and weld the thing shut (indeed, an average human body would have approx 10 million pounds of force acting on them at that depth).
BP was spending approx. $6 million per day at the end of April. That has grown to some $37 million per day now. How many state and local governments have that kind of cash sitting around for a bad day (or 60)?
There are over 2,500 boats working on the cleanup effort. Countless thousands of folks working too.
And those folks aren't sitting at home screaming "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children" from their desk chairs either. They're actually doing something about it.
If you insist on flapping your lips about the issue without fact or insight on a forum devoted to trance music, perhaps you should instead consider putting all that energy into actually DOING SOMETHING. |
The matter of a fact is that BP did not do much to prepare for this possible worst-case scenario. They had no preparation, no plans to deal with this disaster - and no wonder every method they used has failed (note that it took them couple weeks to build their first fix, the huge steel dome - which shows they had no emergency response planning). Why couldn't they drill a relief well, for example? They absolutely did not even think about a possible oil leak.
Any company with brains and proper health/safety & environmental logic would have considered a possible leak and had a system to deal with it. I think every responsible company has some kind of emergency plan for worst-case situations, for example - an emergency kit that I am supposed to have for field work on my environmental job, analysis of possible threats and so on. I am supposed to go over paperwork and sign it along with workers that I supervise BEFORE starting work to assess possible situations and threats at the site.
But British Petroleum has a LONG HISTORY of environmental and health/safety violations, so this huge environmental disaster should not come as a surprise but as an inevitable result of awful corporate ignorance and greed. Read:
http://www.thespec.com/News/article/766193
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BP has long record of violations
could be at least a day before BP can make another attempt at putting a lid on a well spewing thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, as a big containment box meant to siphon the oil away sat idle and encased in ice crystals Sunday.
The company’s first attempt to divert the oil was foiled, its mission now in serious doubt.
Meanwhile, thick blobs of tar washed up on Alabama’s white sand beaches, yet another sign the spill was worsening.
It had taken about two weeks to build the box and three days to cart it 80 kilometres out and slowly lower it to the well 1.6 kilometres below the surface, but the frozen depths were just too much.
BP officials were not giving up hopes that a containment box — either the one brought there or another one being built — could cover the well.
In the nearly three weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers, about 795,000 litres of crude a day has been flowing into the Gulf.
Yet already BP’s actions are facing unprecedented scrutiny, thanks to a years-long history of legal and ethical violations that critics, judges and members of Congress say shows that the London-based company has a penchant for putting profits ahead of just about everything else.
Over the past two decades, BP subsidiaries have been convicted three times of environmental crimes in Alaska and Texas, including two felonies. It remains on probation for two of them.
It also has received the biggest-ever fine for willful work safety violations in U.S. history and is the subject of a wide range of safety investigations, including one in Washington state that resulted last week in a relatively minor $69,000 fine for 13 “serious” safety violations at its Cherry Point refinery near Ferndale, Wash.
While BP has said it accepts responsibility for the spill, it denies that it’s guilty of a systematic pattern of safety and environmental failures.
“We are a responsible and professional company,” said BP Alaska spokesman Steve Rinehart. “We work to high standards. Safety is our highest priority.”
A review of BP’s history, however, shows a pattern of ethically questionable and illegal behaviour that goes back decades.
BP’s best-known disaster took place in 2005, when an explosion at its refinery in Texas City near Galveston, Texas, killed 15 workers, injured 180 people and forced thousands of nearby residents to remain sheltered in their homes.
An investigation of the explosion by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board blamed BP for the explosion and offered a scathing assessment of the company.
It found “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation” and said management failures could be traced from Texas to London.
The company eventually pleaded guilty to a felony violation of the Clean Air Act, was fined $50 million and sentenced to three years of probation.
The Occupational Health and Safety Administration assessed BP the largest fine in OSHA history — $87 million — after inspectors found 270 safety violations that had been previously cited but not fixed and 439 new violations.
BP is appealing that fine, but BP’s legal and ethical problems go back much further.
In Alaska, BP first brought unwelcome attention to itself more than 20 years ago in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Exxon was BP’s partner in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oilfield, the nation’s largest, and shared in the ownership of the trans-Alaska pipeline system, known as Alyeska and headed then by a BP executive who was on loan to the pipeline company.
After a series of documents were leaked to news reporters and Congress that showed how Alyeska failed to live up to its promises to contain spills, that executive, James Hermiller, in February 1990 ordered an undercover operation to track down the leaker.
Hermiller’s chief suspect was Chuck Hamel, a former congressional aide and oil broker in Alexandria, Va., who became a conduit between industry whistleblowers and reporters.
With Hermiller’s blessing, Alyeska hired Wackenhut Corp., a security company in South Florida, to catch Hamel and identify his whistleblowers.
Wackenhut set up a phony environmental law firm and attempted to get Hamel to use it to pursue public interest lawsuits against Alyeska and Exxon. They stole Hamel’s trash, bugged an office he used and hired a beautiful blonde to pretend she was an environmentalist in order to get Hamel to talk.
But the scheme collapsed seven months later when one of the Wackenhut operatives came to believe that it was Hamel who was honorable, not Alyeska, and switched sides, bringing the Wackenhut spies with him.
Hermiller retired at the age of 57 in 1993 in the wake of subsequent investigations and congressional hearings and was eventually replaced by a new BP official, who vowed to clean up Alyeska’s corporate culture. Hamel successfully sued and used some of his damage award to continue his watchdog pursuit of the industry.
BP ran afoul of federal environmental laws in Alaska after it was discovered that from 1993 to 1995 a BP contractor, Doyon Drilling, had illegally dumped hazardous materials down oil well shafts on the North Slope, the giant Alaska oil production area bordered by the Brooks Range mountains to the south and the Arctic Ocean on the north.
Doyon pleaded guilty in federal court to a felony violation of the Clean Water Act and was fined $3 million. BP was convicted on Feb. 1, 2000, of failing to report the dumping as soon as it learned about it, a felony.
BP was fined $500,000, placed on five years’ probation and ordered to create a nationwide environmental management program that cost the company at least $40 million.
A BP official told the judge, “We are committed to ensuring this never happens again.”
But BP was still on probation when new problems erupted, this time in its North Slope corrosion control program.
Despite warnings from a leak-detection system, a badly corroded 34-inch-diameter pipeline in Prudhoe Bay lost oil for at least five days before a worker driving down a nearby service road on March 2, 2006, smelled oil and spotted the spill, which covered at least two acres of tundra. At 200,000 gallons, it was the largest ever on the North Slope.
Just five months later, on Aug. 6, 2006, a second spill of about 1,000 gallons was discovered on another line. Subsequent investigation found the line was riddled with corrosion, with 176 places where more than half the original diameter had been eaten away.
Congressional hearings held to probe the spills immediately focused on claims that BP actively discouraged workers from reporting safety and environmental problems.
The British-born chief of BP’s corrosion unit, Richard Woollam, who was removed from his supervisory role in that unit in 2005, took the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination during the hearings, which uncovered a 2004 report by the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins warning BP that employees faced retaliation for reporting problems.
It’s the 2005 Texas City explosion, however, that drew the harshest accusations against BP — from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which issued a 341-page report in March 2007, two years after the blast, and from a separate commission led by former Secretary of State James Baker III.
Both groups faulted BP’s management at all levels for overlooking problems.
After the 2005 explosion, BP officials said they created a panel to study safety practices at its site, increased the number of people responsible for safety and environmental issues, and spent more than $1 billion on upgrades and repairs.
But others say it is unlikely BP has changed a profit-driven culture that’s so deeply entrenched.
“They push all their people to maximize the profitability of their sector,” said Brent Coon, a Beaumont, Texas, attorney who amassed millions of documents representing workers and residents in lawsuits against BP for the 2005 Texas City explosion.
Coon says he’s already contracted new clients over the Gulf spill and expects to take BP to court again.
“By all evidence I’ve seen,” Coon said, “every operation they’ve ever engaged in, they take capital out of infrastructural repairs to put it into profits and into expansion.” |
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| ChemEnhanced |
| What should he be doing...cleaning pelicans |
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| Magnetonium |
| quote: | Originally posted by ChemEnhanced
What should he be doing...cleaning pelicans |
That would definitely be more useful and helpful to the environment and local communities than just releasing large volumes of greenhouse gases by his private jet from travelling around the affected areas and merely looking at the oil spill, yes.
I cant believe Obama is just going to sit there and wait until BP finishes drilling the relief wells in August.
In acountry of over 300 million, with many brilliant minds and scientists, they couldn't just push BP aside and use a better strategy to stop the leak??? BP is useless, just look at their history.
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| Jayx1 |
AMAZING
how everyone gives him a break (rightly or wrongly)
Either way, you know Bush would have been raked over the coals a thousand times over by now by everyone including TA. And thats my main point.
Bush is always the devil and Obama is always the devine saint no matter what happens.
Unreal how manipulated people can be. |
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| ChemEnhanced |
| quote: | Originally posted by Magnetonium
That would definitely be more useful and helpful to the environment and local communities than just releasing large volumes of greenhouse gases by his private jet from travelling around the affected areas and merely looking at the oil spill, yes.
I cant believe Obama is just going to sit there and wait until BP finishes drilling the relief wells in August.
In acountry of over 300 million, with many brilliant minds and scientists, they couldn't just push BP aside and use a better strategy to stop the leak??? BP is useless, just look at their history.
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they may very well be able to come up with a better strategy then BP but once the Government steps in and takes control then they also take on a portion of liability. Obama is doing the right thing by staying an arms length away from this. There are going to be countless lawsuits over this....which will probably run BP out of business. If the government steps in then they will most definitely be named in any lawsuit...which could destroy an already financially weak USA....we are talking probably in the Trillions of dollars, if not more, in lawsuits. |
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